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December and all of 2014 Stats Roundup

Gone with the Wind is the highest-grossing movie of all time – making over 3 billion dollars1. The next highest-grossing film is Avatar, with just over 2.7 billion dollars to its name.

In December, Akismet caught 10,136,855,000 spam comments – that’s just over 10 billion. If each spam comment were one dollar, that amount would be about equal to 3 times the total sales of Gone with the Wind. Not too shabby.

On the other hand, Akismet saw just 156,497,000 real comments go through in December. If each one of those were one dollar, they’d make up about 4% of the total sales of Gone with the Wind. As is usual, we see much less real comments than spam comments – at a ratio of about 1 to 65 this month.

Here’s the day-to-day breakdown:

The busiest day of the month was the 5th with just over 409 million spam comments, and the slowest day was the 10th with just under 267 spam comments.

For the first time since June, Akismet saw a drop in the number of spam comments month-to-month – we dropped 16% compared to November. However, we still saw a rise of 52% since last year in December.

Now… what about 2014 as a whole? Here’s what that looked like in plot form:

How do the numbers fare against the highest grossing movies of all time? In January 2014, Akismet saw about 6 billion comments go through in total. If each comment were one dollar, that’s like the total sales of Gone with the Wind and Avatar combined.

Things were moving along at about the same rate until August, when we started noticing much more spam coming through. In September we hit the 300 million spam caught per day mark. In total, there were 8 billion comments caught.

November was our highest-traffic month with over 12 billion spam comments caught. Continuing with our movie example, that would be like adding up the totals for the top 4 highest grossing films and then a little more: Gone with the Wind and Avatar and Star Wars and Titanic.

What about the total amount of spam for 2014? That’s 90,326,951,500 – like adding up the total sales of the top 10 movies… and quadrupling that number.

Over the year, you may have seen similar trends in the amount of spam comments that you see come through on your own blog or website. As always, if you’re having any issues please do contact us, we’re happy to help!

We’re looking forward to an even more fruitful 2015, with Akismet continuing to save you from your spam. All of us from Akismet wish you a thrilling, successful, and happy new year!

This post is part of a monthly series summarizing some stats and figures from the Akismet universe. Feel free to browse all of the posts in the series.

Footnote1when adjusted for inflation in 2011 dollars, which is what really counts 😉